What is High End Audio, and what it means to me (Dave Lalin), and not you.

13 March 2018

Dave Lalin writes: What is High End Audio, and what it means to me, and not you.

I was talking to my friend Dave Rudbarg and in a blazing bit of introspection I came to the realization of why we are not enticing more people to seek out better audio.

The reason is simple; most people just don't understand what high quality audio could mean to them in a meaningful way, or know it even exists, and why better equipment is actually really worth the extra expense. I personally hate the term High End Audio which co-notates expensive and snobby, the term I like to use is High Performance Audio.

High Performance Audio is simply that, a product which is designed and conceived to perform better, by dedicated small companies whose prime value is the level of realism and clarity of the sound, over a panoply of useless features or sheer convenience. So is high end audio expensive not really, is it big or expensive, not really, it just depends on how far you want to go in terms of your budget and how real you want your sound to be.

So is Bose or Sonos High End Audio or Mass Market? If you make something in large quantities, and you price it really inexpensively, such as $200-$600 for a complete amplifier and speaker combo, most likely the performance will be somewhat ......